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  • Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America
  • Gabriella M. Petrick
Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. By Frederick Douglas Opie (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 238 pp. $24.95).

In Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, Frederick Douglas Opie attempts to understand the formation and transformation of soul food in African-America culture. Opie argues that “Soul is the style of rural folk culture. Soul is black spirituality and experiential wisdom. And soul is putting a premium on suffering, endurance, and surviving with dignity. … [Soul food] is the intellectual invention and property of African Americans” (p. xi) Thus Opie is claiming that soul food is a distinctly African-America cuisine that has been influenced by, rather than derivative of, other cultures. In this vein, Opie is running counter to Atlantic-World historians who claim African traditions as the basis for African-American foodways as well as Southern scholars who have neglected soul food’s African heritage.

Taking a longue durée approach to his book, Opie sees the opening of the world during the Age of Exploration as a process that included Africa. He argues that African foodways, particularly those of the Igbo and Mende of West Africa, were influence first by Iberian traders and later by Arabs, making Africa an integral part of global dietary transformation during the Columbian Exchange. Additionally, the cooking techniques of West Africans were quite varied and encompassed frying, baking, stewing, smoking, salting, drying and [End Page 326] pickling. These cooking techniques were eventually transferred with slaves to both the Caribbean and American Colonies forming the basis of plantation food culture. Equally, Africans transferred their ritual and religious foods with them into slavery. Opie notes that the African-American concept of soul—as derivative from West African religious traditions—prized spirituality, love, patience, hard work, and pride, which African-Americans blended into their food traditions.

As interesting as the connection between Africa and the Americas are, Opie has a tendency to overstate linkages between African and African-American foodways. For example he states that West African foofoo or fufu, a pounded paste usually made of boiled cassava and/or green plantains, is similar to cornbread in South Carolina because both were used to sop up liquid and convey food into the mouth. Yet, these are very different foods: foofoo is a pulse and resembles uncooked yeast dough and cornbread is a quick bread (or at a minimum a cooked batter known as hoe cake) and is not dough-like and runs the gambit from a flatbread to a pancake to a bread. Additionally, any number of cultures, not just West Africans, use a variety of simple flat breads and pulses to convey food into the mouth. Tortillas from Mexico and Central America and poi from Hawaii and Polynesia come immediately to mind. Also the flavors of foofoo and West African stews or soups and cornbread used to soak-up saltpork fat and either cane or sorghum molasses could not have tasted more different. So while I certainly agree that African food cultures moved with slaves into colonial worlds, particularly as manifest in the South Carolina lowcountry, a better understanding of the foods themselves would have provided for a more nuanced analysis.

Once enslaved, according to Opie, African-American cooks quickly adapted new ingredients into their diets, largely because they had no choice. By the late 18th century African-style dishes were served on planters’ tables as African-American women dominated plantation kitchens. Yet not all African-style food made it on to planters’ tables. The far more pedestrian and monotonous diets of the field-hand, saltpork, cornbread, and molasses with occasional seasonal foods from garden plots (if the master allowed, which was not always the case); food foraged from fields and forests; or food stolen out of the plantation larder were distinctly slave foods. This dietary exchange also worked in reverse as well. African-American cooks learned how to make foods familiar to the British, such as both fruit and meat pies, and created their own versions of these new foods, southern fruit cobbler for example. By the time of the Civil War...

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